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AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File A driver displaying Lyft and Uber stickers on his front windshield drops off a customer in downtown Los Angeles. This article appears in the Summer 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . F or the past three decades, employers have used numerous techniques in their quest to reclassify their workers as independent contractors rather than as employees. Doing so enables them to avoid paying minimum wages, overtime premiums, expense reimbursements, workers’ compensation, health insurance, and numerous other statutory obligations. It also makes it illegal for their workers to form a union. To this end, employers have adjusted job titles, rearranged job duties, removed company logos from delivery vehicles, and even abandoned required company uniforms in order to portray their workers as independent contractors. These types of employer strategies have generated a massive amount of litigation. For example, in the “gig economy,” the issue of...

In 2007, Antonio Jackson, an African American worker at the Rent-a-Center store in Washoe County, Nevada, concluded that he had been repeatedly denied promotion to sales manager because of his race. He complained to his store manager, the corporate office, and the human-resource department, all to no avail. Instead he was suspended, then transferred to a less desirable location, and ultimately fired. Jackson sued for race discrimination, only to be told by his employer that he had forfeited his rights to appeal his case when he took the job. Rent-a-Center required all employees to agree to compulsory arbitration. The waiver covered the right to sue not just for civil-rights violations but also for violations of other hard-won employee rights such as a minimum wage, overtime pay, rest breaks, parental leave, and disability rights as well as protection from workplace sex discrimination and sexual harassment. Astonishingly, in 2010, the Supreme Court agreed with Rent-a-Center, holding...